“Instead of teaching, I told stories”

Frank McCourt had been telling his stories for decades in New York bars before he wrote his first book. I imagine that his audience always egged him on, because McCourt is a natural raconteur.

Born in America and brought up in a poverty-stricken, single-parent household in Ireland, McCourt had a miserable childhood. His first memoir, Angela’s Ashes, was published when he was 66. I am not a sentimental reader, but that book had me in tears. He followed it up with a second memoir, ‘Tis, and eventually published the final part of his autobiographical trilogy a few years before he died.

Teacher Man covers the 30-odd years when McCourt taught in the New York City public schools. He describes how he drifted into teaching in ‘Tis, and in the prologue to this book he says:

I had the nagging feeling I’d given teaching short shrift. In America, doctors, lawyers, generals, actors, television people and politicians are admired and rewarded. Not teachers. Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions.

He rambles on to imagine his teaching career:

You think you’ll walk into the classroom, stand a moment, wait for silence, watch while they open notebooks and click pens, tell them your name, write it on the board, proceed to teach. [..]

You’ll feast on the bodies of English and American literature. What a time you’ll have […]

You’ll be nominated for awards. Teacher of the Year, Teacher of the Century. […]

They’ll fly you to Hollywood, where you’ll star in movies about your own life. […] Your father could be played by Clark Gable […]

As you might guess, his teaching career — “one hundred and seventy students at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Borough of Staten Island” — did not run quite like that.

One the first day, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long.

So this is a book about the teaching journey, not a glorious fanciful outcome. It is lovely reading. As the reader, you will want to know why he was almost fired, and how this discussion of ‘friendship’ with a sheep arose. It turns out that, as McCourt describes it

Instead of teaching, I told stories.

Most of these stories were about his own childhood and upbringing. The students (perhaps inspired as much by a desire to avoid tedious schoolwork as by their interest) would ask questions like

So, you Scotch or something?

Sir, did they have algebra in olden times in Ireland?

You all Catlics in Ireland?

So, teacher, how did you come to America and all that?

His students were immigrants — Sicilian, Italian, Dominican, Jewish, Chinese, Greek, black, white, brown — who were no stranger to poverty since their parents often worked multiple jobs to keep afloat, but the class ended up captivated by the stories of McCourt’s poverty-stricken childhood in another country. And no wonder, because the tales are sad, realistic, full of black humour, charming but also touching.

When I grew older I said [to my mother] that she should have sold Malachy and there would have been more food for the rest of us. She said, Well I offered you but the woman wasn’t a bit interested.

Girls in the class said, Aw gee, Mr McCourt, your mother shouldn’t have done that to you. [..]

Boys in the class said, Well he ain’t no Clark Gable. Just kiddin’, Mr McCourt.

As with the descriptions of his own childhood, McCourt is quite specific and clear-sighted about the lives and actions of the children he is teaching. They are destined to be plumbers, dockworkers, and construction workers, according to their parents, so why do they need to spend time learning obscure words like ‘condign’ or identify the subject and predicate of a sentence? McCourt internally struggles with this question while his students do their best to throw the lesson offtrack. But then, somehow, over the course of the class, a few students begin to listen and participate, in their own argumentative way. And that is success enough.

McCourt writes about his own life as well: dating the lovely June in his college class, and discovering she was also dating their professor; marrying Alberta at thirty; getting a Masters in English Literature. His wife has literary friends who are authors and publishers, but they look down on and make fun of McCourt the Irish rube. The marriage does not survive, and a decade later McCourt remarries.

His own life is interesting and rounds out the narrative, but as befits the title of this book, the stories about his students were more beguiling. In 1968, teaching at Seward Park High School, some students push for a field trip, and he takes them to see a movie.

On the six-block walk to the subway, the parade of twenty-nine black girls and one white teacher attracted attention.

The girls are rowdy, noisy, and the other subway passengers are hostile. In the movie theater the students throw popcorn and yell at the projectionist. The usher threatens to evict them.

I pleaded with them. Girls, please be quiet. Management is on its way.

They turned it into a chant. […] They said management could kiss their ass.

And then, when the movie ends, they refuse to leave so that they can watch it again. Later he takes them to see Hamlet, which goes much the same way. Each time, though, there are one or two students who enjoy the movie or play as much as the class outing. Each time, there are wildly expansive class discussions afterwards, about why everyone picks on Ophelia, why Hamlet’s mom doesn’t just slap his face…

They were building bridges where we could travel back and forth. […] I had their attention and that was all that mattered.